Indian workers are being paid to film themselves performing everyday tasks—creating training data that helps robots learn human movements, raising questions about whether the job itself will eventually be automated.

What happened: Thousands of Indian workers are recording first-person video of themselves doing household and industrial tasks—folding clothes, making sandwiches, slicing mangoes—and sending the footage to AI training companies like Objectways. Workers earn just over two dollars an hour. The videos teach robots how to navigate and move in real-world environments by feeding what is called 'egocentric data' (first-person footage) into specialized AI models.

Why it matters: India has positioned itself as a global middleman for AI data creation and processing, providing new employment in the short term. However, the government think-tank NITI Aayog has warned that automation poses risks, particularly for India's 490 million informal workers—people like street flower-garland makers and factory laborers who currently form 'the backbone of our economy.' The data these workers are creating may eventually enable robots to replace the very jobs they and future generations would perform.

What to watch: Investment bank Morgan Stanley predicts there could be over a billion humanoid robots in use by 2050, mostly for industrial and commercial purposes. Meanwhile, workers expressing concern—such as a 55-year-old flower-garland seller who has also been paid to wear a camera—point to a tension: India is building its AI industry on labor that may not exist in the next decade.